On Earth as It Is in Heaven: How the Lord's Prayer Teaches Us to Pray More Effectively by Warren W. Wiersbe

I am at the beach this week on vacation.  My wife’s family has for years gone to Panama City Beach as an extended family.  My nieces that I nanny are here and we are enjoying the week.  The most common activity is sitting by the pool or on the beach reading.  I wholeheartedly enjoy this type of vacation.  In between taking turns playing with the girls and the necessities of eating and sleeping I have been reading most of the time.  I have finished 7 books in the  4 days I have been here (I finished up a couple that I had started previously.)

I decided to read On Earth As It Is In Heaven today.  It was offered free on Tuesday and I finished it by early evening (it is about 170 pages in print).  So I am posting this review before some books that I have already read because the book is free right now for Kindle.

Overall this is a good book on the Lord’s Prayer.  But honestly, if you are buying one book on the Lord’s Prayer I think you should buy Living Prayer (my review part 1, part 2).  Wiersbe is very traditional in his interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer, and for the most part there is nothing that I really disagree with.  But there is an emphasis that I think can be distracting.  He spends a couple pages talking about reverence, which I agree that Evangelicals can be a bit irreverent, but then he complains about coffee and chewing gum in church service.  In my opinion, coffee and chewing gum are examples of cultural overlays, not inheret prohibitions in worship.

This brings up a problem, not just with this books but with a large number of Christian books.  We talk about cultural biases as if they are biblical cross cultural prohibitions.  And when someone then decides that the author (or speaker or friend) is talking about something that is cultural and not biblical, they start discounting many other issues (or prohibitions or commands) that actually are biblical.  I do not think that we can completely stop this.  We always will have difficultly separating culture from bible.  But I think the previous generation of “modern” Christians has a particularly difficult time with this issue.

I respect Wiersbe.  I listened to him on the radio as I was growing up and I think his ministry has been very strong.   And overall I think this was a very good, introduction to the Lord’s Prayer.  I just do not think that if you are going to buy just one, that this should be the one.  If you can pick it up for free, then I think you should pick it up.  We can still learn a lot from our elders in the faith, even when we do not always agree with them on all points.